The Age of Innocence (1993) by Martin Scorsese

Film number 25 and the final recommendation of this Netflix series.

Following the six recommendations mentioned in the introductory article, I have introduced you, during the last six weeks, to three Netflix films a week, making it to a total of 24. Now I want to close off these regular Netflix recommendations with number 25: Martin Scorsese’s 1993 film The Age of Innocence. If you haven’t seen this film adaptation of Edith Wharton‘s Pulitzer prize winning novel from 1920, this is your chance. If you have seen it, it might be the right opportunity to rewatch it, as I did.

The Age of Innocence introduces us to a fascinating milieu: the long-vanished upper-class New York of the 1870’s and its social conventions. In many ways it reminds of the British aristocratic world of Downton Abbey. But in New York it deals with new-rich families and sumptuous homes, rather than with British aristocracy and manors. In both worlds everyone knew what was the right thing to do and made sure that one stayed within that frame. Families and reputations needed to be protected. WW I made that world crumble and start to fall apart. Wharton herself lived through that period of time. She lived a privileged life in an élite social milieu, but became a New York-born European free spirit. In that sense the Age of Innocence has many autobiographical elements.

Scorsese’s eye for detail and his striving for perfection are well-documented. He spent eighteen months of research for this film, studying reference books about that time period, seeing historical costume films and studying books. The visual impact is enormous. The opera scenes, the opulent interiors, the furniture, the ballrooms, the costumes, the flower decorations, the paintings on the wall – they are all caught with meticulous detail.

It was a time when people could seldom express what they really thought. Everything had to fit the conventions. Things could only be talked around.  As Wharton did, Scorsese makes use of a narrator, helping us to understand some of the innermost thoughts of Newland Archer, the protagonist of the film. Edith Wharton’s prose is concise, reflective, beautiful.

The Age of Innocence is a romantic tragedy about Newland Archer, a young promising lawyer, who is engaged to be married with May, a young, sweet girl. He meets her cousine Ellen, who is unhappily married to a Polish count and gets passionately fascinated by her and her free spirit. Newland is inescapably bound and restricted by the social conventions and so, although he wants her, he cannot have her. The end of the film is thirty years later in time and leads our thoughts not only to what they couldn’t have, but also to what they have been able to have.

Like in Kar-Wei Wongs film In the Mood for Love (2000) it is so easy to get annoyed with Newlands passivity and his lack of freedom to follow his own heart, but then both films also ask the question, does following one’s own heart always leads to happiness? Maybe after all it was a social arrangement with advantages and disadvantages? Maybe in the end the memory of Ellen is better than the reality? Maybe love is more complex and ambiguous than we can imagine?

See the film! Or read the book. Or do both!

Rinus, May 2020

Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash

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